BENGALURU: Brick-and-mortar retailers are often at war with e-commerce ventures for adversely impacting their business. Now, in a unique initiative, mobile wallet and e-commerce firm Paytm has brought together a number of offline electronics retailers under a scheme where they will offer a common price for a product, and when a customer orders that product, it would be delivered by the offline store nearest to the customer.

"Through this partnering, we are looking to deliver electronic goods within a day across 100 cities," Paytm founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma told TOI. Sharma declined to disclose the retailers who are part of the project, but sources told TOI that chains like Mobile Store, Croma, Spice Hotspot, Sangeetha Mobiles, Vijay Sales, Vasan and several others have either come on board or are in discussions.

Paytm will use its location analysis to route the order to the customer's nearest offline retail store. "Many of the prominent electronics players fail to generate good traffic on their own sites. This partnership will solve their problem. Typically, online players are competing with offline players, but we are looking to get them to sell through us," said Sharma.

Paytm has more than 100 million wallets with 75 million transactions happening on the platform every month. The Noida-based company, which has received $575 million from Alibaba group, has been expanding its e-commerce business, taking on entrenched players like Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal.